Proof: Chinese Have Least Fei Hua
Measuring the content of a language.Finally, a scientific validation of what we already knew intuitively!
Brad Plumer over at Ezra Klein’s blog has a link to a Time article where researchers coded languages to see which ones were more information-dense—meaning they contained more meaning per syllable. English is fairly dense, with a score of .91.
Mandarin Chinese was the densest language studied, with a score of .94.
Japanese scored pathetically, scoring a mere .49.
Clearly this should be taken as definitive proof that the Chinese have the least amount of fei hua, useless speech, while the Japanese will talk your ears off but say nothing.
But wait, what’s that?
Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.
Aw, nuts.
Humor aside, it’s an interesting article on how the spoken speed of a language will vary due to the information density, with the result being an equal amount of information being transmitted in the same amount of time.
“Mandarin Chinese was the densest language studied, with a score of .94.
Japanese scored pathetically, with a low density of a mere .49.”
Chinese has effectively no grammar, and Japanese/Korean are chock-full of formalities (politeness levels, extended verb conjugations, etc).
I find that about 90% of ‘speech’ i hear in Chinese is frivolous BS, but that says more about the people I’m talking to than the langauge itself. Also with a tonal language like Chinese, there is WAY too much “Did you mean this? Did you say this? Was it this one or that one?” I once went on a tourbus around Zhejiang province, and the guide spent the first 10 minutes just telling us how to write the name of the place we were visitng (eg “清楚的请， 尽享的享。。。。”) The Character system is just a bad idea, nevermind how hard it is for young kids to learn it.
But that’s a whole other subject.
Oh yes. About the only big advantages to such an information dense system that i can think of is to confuse foreigners, make it easy to be snooty about your own culture, and put even more useless information in tweets.
And the sad thing is that it doesn’t even save any time. You just talk slower.
While I was doing research related to cultural and critical theory I noticed that a lot of scholars depend on linguistic theory, which I took as a kind of “flavor of the month” trend in academia; but then I started to actually think about how language really does shape the way we think, and it all made sense.
Actually, this episode of RadioLab was my lightbulb moment: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/ Blew my mind! One of the ideas put forth is that, not only does language shape the way we think, it actually provides us with the ability to think through signification. It’s one of those things that seems obvious after you have the realization. How, then, do the parameters of our native languages shape our ability to understand and relate to the world around us? And at what point (if ever) can we transcend the way our language has taught us to think?
Actually, I feel like people get it backwards. Language molds itself to fit the needs of the moment–if a term is needed, then a word evolves or is created to fit that need. Language is not deterministic–alone, it cannot account for differences between people or cultures.
A perfect example is the word “meme”. Or the word “nerd”. Nowadays, nerd is often used in the way “enthusiast” used to be used. 30 years ago, could you even conceive of a football nerd or a fashion nerd?
Language evolves to fit human needs, and will stretch to meet our needs. You can point to words in other languages that have no equivalence in English, but many of these words have become part of the English language. To deny otherwise would be to say that no non-German speaker could ever understand the concept of gestalt, or no non-Chinese could understand fengshui.
The words we choose to describe things can shape our thinking quite a bit–there’s a lot of excellent research on that. But that’s a limitation of vocabulary, not a limitation of language itself.
My point was more how the language we first learn shapes the way we think based on the fact that our first language is almost exclusively how we signify or symbolize our environment and experiences in the early stages of our development. How do the tools we are given influence our basic ability to construct? The examples you give occur after one is already proficient in a language.
I think the differences between languages and how they affect our thinking is certainly nuanced, but not insignificant. It’s a bit of a chicken/egg – did the language make the Chinese or the Chinese make the language. You’re right to point out that we manipulate language too and can grasp words and concepts unique to other languages (though, again, I would argue you have to be advanced enough in your own language to create/understand a complex enough description to capture the concept in the first place), but surely it is a two-way street.
It’s interesting that they use a syllable as a semantic unit.
What I don’t understand is why eventually the same amount of information is transferred in one minute of speech.
If the number of syllables is as the number of vowels – then the speed of pronunciation should be proportionate to the number of syllables.
Well, I think the general idea is that, no matter what the language, our brains can only process information at a certain pace. Languages which encode a lot of nuance in each syllable will be spoken slower.
Think about it in terms of the written language as well. A slim Chinese volume translated into English turns huge, several times the number of pages. However, I don’t think that you can claim that Chinese people can finish the same book in Chinese faster than an American could read the same book in English. Chinese read each page slower, as a result of it being more information dense.
The point they seem to be trying to make is this–the speed of a language is determined by how many syllables it takes to express an idea, not by how fast people are able to talk. If it takes you 20 syllables to express the same idea that it takes me 10 syllables to express, you will speak twice as fast as I will.
This leads to the natural conclusion that our ability to process information is limited not by how fast we can speak a language but by the ability of our brains to process information.
The semantic unit here is syllables per idea.